 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Hi, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco. This is an internal R&D innovation offsite that VMware does, lots of innovation going on here from engineers from all over the globe. We're pleased to welcome Joe Bagley, a CTO from Amia from VMware. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. Hi. So we've been having some great conversations this morning about this tremendous amount of innovation and the potential is massive, not just from radio, but from all the other innovation programs that VMware has really speaks very strongly to the culture of innovation that VMware has had. But of course, all this innovation has to be able to be harnessed to deliver what customers need. Talk to us about that. You're in the field, field CTO. What is that connection with the innovation that happens within VMware? How do customers help influence that vice versa? Yeah, I think we're very unique in the structure that we've put around that to drive that innovation over the years. So my job as field CTO is, I call it sort of 50-50, so 50% is chief technology officer, which is this kind of stuff at radio, and 50% is chief talking officer, which is out with our customers and presenting it in conferences, et cetera. But the general remit is connecting R&D in the field. And so for eight years now, I've been connecting R&D in the field at VMware. I actually did it in my previous company as well. And what we've done is we've built a series of programs over the years to do that. And one of the biggest ones is the CTO ambassadors. And so that was, you get to a point, you get to a growth size, I've been here eight years, and suddenly you need someone else to help you because I can't be everywhere. And the original role was, back in the day, I was hired to scale Steve Herrod because Steve Herrod couldn't be in Europe all the time. I was like, you know, mini Steve Herrod that could be there when needed. But then eventually I can't be in every European country in our major regions as we get bigger and bigger. And we've grown dramatically. So the CTO ambassadors is to support that. And that's really, we've got 140 of our top customer facing techies from around the globe in this program called the ambassadors. And they have to be customer facing. They have to be individual contributors. So you know, like a pre-sales manager and something doesn't count. And they're a massively active community. There's a whole bunch of them here at radio as well. And their job is really that conduit, that source of information, and also a sounding board, a much shorter range sounding board for R&D. So if R&D want to get a feel of what's going on, they don't have to ask everyone. They can bounce off the ambassadors, which is part of what we do and that makes it easier. So like a filter too. They're also filtering input from the field, packaging it up for R&D. Totally. Yeah. And when you're at an organization of our scale, filtering is really important. Cause obviously, you know, you can't have every customer directly talking to every engineer. It's just, it's never going to work, right? I mean, another radio project there right there, a machine learning based champion CTO to go through all the feedback. Yeah, so I mean, I started my career, I started my previous company doing that. I was the filter. So, you know, I'd get 100 questions a day from various people in the field and 99 of those, I'd bounce right back cause I knew the answer. But there was the one that I was like, ah, then I turn around to R&D and ask them. But the great thing was that R&D knew that if I was asking, then it was a real question. It wasn't the other 99. So the CTO ambassadors and what we do in octoglobal field is really a method of scaling that. I want to ask you about that because that's a great example of where reputation comes in because your reputation is on the line when you, if you go back and pull the fire alarm, if you will, send too many, you know, lame requests back, you're going to be lame. So you've got to kind of check balance there. So that begs the question, how do you do the filtering for the champions that work for you? Is there a high bar? Is there a certain lines? Like, you know, being a kid, you got to be this tall to ride the roller coasters. These are criteria. Is there a certification? Take a screen. So the filtering there. The ambassador program is a rotating nomination system. So essentially there's a two-year tenure. So what happens is if you're in the field and you want to be an ambassador, which is a prestigious thing, then you nominate yourself or get nominated and then people vote on you and you put forward your case, et cetera. And essentially it's a democratic process based on your peers and on other people in the company. And then after you're allowed a maximum of two years and then two tenure, so you get four years if that makes sense. We're not confusing you. So term limits. Yeah, there's term limits, right? We have term limits. And after two terms, you have to go out for a year to give someone else a chance because otherwise we'll just get, you know, it'll just, you know. You turn in the US government. Well, I'll go there. But no, it's important to maintain freshness, maintain diversity and all those kinds of things in that. And so, you know, it comes back to that filter piece you were talking about before. The reputation is massive of the CT ambassadors. I mean, when we started this sort of six years ago as a program, there wasn't, you know, most of R&D were like, who are these ambassador guys? What value are they going to add? Now, if you're an R&D, one of the best things you can say if you want to get something done is what the CT ambassador said. I mean, literally it is, you know, you can go in and we have. So the team approach to that. Talk about how you guys add in a new category. So for instance, Kubernetes, you know, we saw this years ago when KubeCon was started, the Kube was there, President of Creation, and that trend, we kind of got it right away. Now Gelsinger sees this as a, and the team sees this as a massive extraction layer. So that would be an example where we need an ambassador. So do you like just create one or how does that work? They create themselves. That's the best thing. So we have an annual conference, which is in February held in Palo Alto, where we all get together along with all the chief technologists, which is, you know, the level below me, and the principals, which is the most senior field people. So literally the best of the best gets together. It's about 200 plus get together for a week. And we are an hour and a half, one-on-one with Pat, for example. So Pat's there with all of us in the room and this. But one of the sessions we do is the Shark Tank, and there's two of them. One of them is come up with your really cool, crazy, wacky ideas. And the other one is the Acquisition Shark Tank. And so there we get the M&A team, including our East Staff sit in, and the ambassadors as teams will come in and present. We think we should acquire, because that's making a big difference. And the great thing is, you know, so about nine times out of 10, probably seven times out of 10, the East Staff are going, yeah, we know about them. And actually we can't really tell you what's going on, but yeah, we know about them. But there's the two or three times out of 10, people are like, oh yeah, so tell me more about them. And it might be a company that's just coming up. It might be, you know, 2013, and there's this company called Docker that no one's heard of, but the ambassadors are shouting about Docker and containers are big, you know. So there's that sort of thing. So white space is too emerging. You could see, it's a telemetry, literally feedback from the field to direct management on business strategy. And our customers are pushing our field in directions faster than maybe R&D get pushed, if you know what I mean. But you guys deserve a lot of credit because Pat Gelsman was just on this morning with Lisa and me, we were talking about that. He just came back from the sales president's club cruise and one of the comments he said was the sales executive said, hey, who does strategy? Because everything's fitting together beautifully, which kind of kind of highlights how radiance all progresses, not like magic. This process here and this kind of points to your job is to fit that pieces in. Is that correct? Yeah, people always say, you know, as a CTO, do you all sit down once a week and talk about strategy? And that's not what you do. There's a hive mind. There's a continual interaction. There's conference calls. There's phone calls. There's meetings. There's get-togethers of various different types, groups and levels. And what happens is, you know, there's themes that emerge over that. And so my role specifically as the Amir CTO is to represent your Middle Eastern Africa's voice in those conversations. And maybe the nuances that we might have around particular product requirements or whatever to remind people that maybe sit in a bubble in Silicon Valley. I'm sure you raise your hand on privacy and GDPR. Just a couple of times. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, now and again. But I think, you know. Well, the canary in the coal mine is a really big point that helps companies if they're not listening to the signals coming in. What you do, and you see a lot, there's a lot of the tech companies that I see. It's often defined as the sort of three bubbles. So you're Massimo Raffae, who's now at Amazon when he was here, did this fantastic blog post talking about that the first bubble is Silicon Valley and the second bubble is kind of North America and the third bubble is everywhere else. And so you kind of watch these things emerge. And my job is to jump over that, pop into the Silicon Valley bubble before something happens and say, no, you should be thinking about X, you should think about Y. You know, at an event like radio, I've got a force multiplier because I've got 40 plus ambassadors with me all popping up with all these little booths you see behind you and the shows and the talk. And the goal here is not to be a bubble, but to be completely one hive mine. And the diversity at VMware just blows my mind. It really does. I think a lot of people comment on it quite often. In fact, I've been asked to be a non-exec director of other companies to help them advise on their culture, which is not in tech on culture, which is quite interesting. And so the diversity that we have here is really enthusing people to innovate in a way they've not done before. It's that diverse set of opinions really helps. Well, it does. And this, from what we've heard, radio is a very, there's a lot of internal competition. It's like a badge of honor to be able to respond to the call for papers, let alone get selected. Touch on the synergies, the symbiosis that I feel like I'm hearing between the things that are presented here, the CTO ambassadors and the customers. Like maybe a favorite example of a product or service that came from, maybe CTO advisor, ambassador to radio to market. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any one specific one. They're always bits and pieces and things here and there. I said, good, well I should have thought that before I came on really. I think what you're looking at here is, it's much more about an informed conversation. And so it's those ideas around the fact that, and also quite often, someone will have a cool idea and they'll go to the ambassadors, can you find me five customers that want to try this? Bang, we've got it. So if you're out there in a customer and someone comes to you as an ambassador and says, I've got a really cool thing I'd like you to try. Maybe it might be before, we don't have things called flings, it might even be before it's made a fling, you've probably heard from Mornay how that process goes. Then engage fast, because you're probably getting that conduit direct into the core of R&D. So a lot of the features that people see and functions and products, et cetera, that people see. So, you know, stuff we're doing with, a lot of the work you see, we're doing with the next version of VRealize, our management platform. A lot of that has been driven by work that's been done by ambassadors in the field and what we're doing there. There's some, all the stuff you'll see, I've got my jacket over there with nano-edger in on it. A lot of the edge stuff that you see, a lot of the stuff around the ESXi on ARM, a lot of the stuff around that is driven specifically around particular product range. So a really good example is a few years ago, probably about four, myself and Ray sat down and had a meeting in the Enwell Barcelona with a retail customer. And the retail customer was talking about, you know, could we get them like an SDDC, but small enough to fit in every store? They didn't say that at the time, but that's how we kind of got to it. So that started off a whole process in our minds and then I went back and the easiest actual way for me to do it was to then get a bunch of the ambassadors to present that as one of their innovation ideas, which became nano-edge. I originally called it VX Nook, because we were going to do it on Intel Nooks, but unfortunately the naming committee wouldn't allow VX Nook, so it became nano-edge. And that drove a whole change within the company, I think, within R&D. So if you think up until that point four years ago, most of what we were doing was, you know, how do we run things bigger and faster? Like how do we get, you know, it's all like monster VM, remember that, all those kind of things, right? How do we get these SAP HANA 12 terabyte VMs running? And really nano-edge was not necessarily a product per se, but it was more of a movement driven by a particular individual, Simon Richardson, who got promoted to principal as a result through the ambassador program, that was driven through our R&D to get them to think small as well as big, you know? So next time you're building that thing, how small can you run ESX? How small can we get an ESX? Can we get it to- Small at scale, which is edge, right? And, you know, so you get small at scale, which was edge and so suddenly everyone starts talking about edge and I'm like, hang on, I've been talking about this for a while now, but we just didn't really call it that. And then along comes technology like Kubernetes, which is how do you manage thousands of small things? And it's kind of, these things come together. But yes, totally. You could almost say our edge strategy and a lot of the early edge work was done and driven out of stuff that was done from CTO ambassadors. This is one of the examples- What are some of the Kubernetes service mesh? Because if you, you know, one of the things we heard from Pat, and we heard this before, but most recently a Dell Technologies world in the last couple of weeks was don't look down, look up, which basically means we're automating the infrastructure, blah, I get that, we'll cover that in our museum. But looking up the stack means, you're talking about Kubernetes app developers, you've got cloud native, you've got service meshes, microservices, new kinds of challenges around instrumentation. How are you guys at an inside radio looking at that trend because there's some commercial impact. You've got Heptio, you've got, you know, Craig and the team, some of the original guys. As well as you have a future state coming out with state, pun intended data and a stateless. These are things, these are new dynamics. Yeah, yeah. What's the R&D take on this? Well, so there's two ways that I really talk to people about this. And the first one is I've got a concept that I talk about called application chromatography, which sounds mental, but you remember from high school probably chromatography was where you had that really special paper and you put the dot of liquid on it, it spread out into all its constituent parts. That's actually what's happening with our applications right now. So we've gone through a history of re-platform, you know, mainframe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, so then when we got to x86, everything's on x86, along comes cloud and as you know, John, for the last 10 years, it's been everything's going to cloud because we think that's the next platform, it's not. But then everything's not going to SaaS, it's not all going to PaaS, it's not all going to functions, it's not all going to containers. What you're seeing is those applications are coming off that one big server and they're spreading themselves out to the right places. So I talk to customers now and they say, okay, well actually I need a management plan and a strategy and an architecture for infrastructures as a service, containers as a service, functions as a service, platform as a service and SaaS and I need a structure for that on-premises and off-premises. So that's truly driving our R&D thinking. It's not, how do we help our customers get from one of those to the other? They're going to all of them. It sounds like a green screen for media. It is, and then the other side of that is I've just had a conversation, some of the best, you know what these events are like, some of the best conversations are, you know, in the water cooler, in perception, in the hallway. In the hallway, yeah, exactly. I've just had a fascinating conversation with one of our guys that's been talking about, oh, it's really cool if we got Kubernetes because I could use it right down at the edge. I could use it to manage thousands of tiny edge things. And as I'm talking to him and sort of saying what he's doing, I suddenly, well, hang on a second, how does a developer talk to that? He's like, well, I've not really thought about that. I said, well, that's your problem. We need to stop thinking about things from how can that framework help me, but how can I extend that framework? And so a lot of that- Or moving beyond just standing up Kubernetes for what purpose? Or is that what, you know, the why, what kind of? So if the developer's there, it shouldn't be, I'm going to use this new framework to solve my problem at the edge of an R&D person would, but people like myself are there to drive them to think of the bigger picture. You know, so ultimately at some point, a developer in the future is going to want to sit there and through an API, push out stuff to a SQL server, a bit of Mongo over here, some stuff on AWS, go and use a service on Azure, at the same time pushing stuff into their own data center and maybe push a container to every store if they're a retailer. And they want to do that through one place. That's what we're building. And, you know, driving that, all these bits and pieces you see behind you, pulling those all together into this sort of consistent operations model, as I'm sure you've heard many of you talk about. And it's dynamic, it's not static. So it's not like provisioning the old way. You've got to track what's being turned on and off because how do you log off? What goes turns on? What services get turned on, turned off, turned on? If you look at a theme of really, I suppose, not only radio, but our industry over the last few years, people have always said, it's that cliche, change is constant, right? Oh, change is constant. Yet still, architects build systems that are static, right? You know, you can think, I'm designing an architecting this new system for the next three years. I'm like, that's stupid. What you need to do is design a system that you know is going to change before you've even finished starting it. More or less started going halfway through it. So actually, you know, as I see, I was in a fantastic session yesterday with the architects around ESX and vCenter, which might be boring to most, but we're re-architecting that for scale. Well, I think that's the key thing. I mean, this is, first of all, we love this conversation because if you can make it programmable with APIs and have data available, that's the architecture because it's programmable. It's not static. So you let it morph into however the application, because I think, you know, I mentioned green screen, you know, chroma keys as we have those concepts here. But that's what you're saying. Apps are going to have this notion of, I need a nap right now, and then it goes away. Services are going to be provisioning and turning on. There's a transience. There's a transience to infrastructure. There's a transience to applications. There's a transience to components that traditional mechanisms aren't built to do. So if you look at actually, what are we building here and what's that sort of hive mind message? It's how do we provide that platform going forward that supports transience that allows customers to come. I mean, people used to use the term agile, but it's been overused and it's not right. It's the fact that, literally, it's a situation of constant change. And what you're deploying onto, it's constantly changing. And what you're deploying is constantly changing. So we're trying to work out how do we put that piece in the middle that is also changing, but allows you some kind of constancy in what you're doing, right? So we can plug new things in the bottom, a new cloud here, a new piece of software, a new piece of hardware there or whatever. And at the same time, there's new ways of doing architecture coming on top. That's the challenge of us. The software defined data center is almost like an operating system for clouds or the future operating system for all apps on all clouds in all locations. It's just some stinking for sure, absolutely. Yeah, great point. Let's put your chief talking officer head on for a second. If I don't be doing that for the last 15 minutes. As we look at... You're a great cube guest. We'd love to have you. FBM World 2019, which is just around the corner. Any cool Amia customers that are going to be on stage that we should be excited to hear about? We're not. So actually I was having a meeting yesterday morning about that, so I can't really say, but there's some exciting stuff we're lining up right now. We're obviously now's the time we start thinking about the keynotes, now's the time we start thinking about who's on stage. Myself and a few others are responsible for what those demos are. You know, the cool demos you see on stage every year. So we literally had the meeting yesterday morning at radio to discuss what's going to be the wow at FBM World this year. So I'm not going to give anything away to you. I'll just say make sure you're there to watch it because it's going to be good. We're also making sure there's a big difference between what we're doing in Moscow now and what we're going to be doing in Barcelona. And when we expand theCUBE outside the United States, certainly we'd love to have you guys plug in and localize some of these unique challenges. Like you said, I agree. Bubble, now the west of the world that has different challenges. Definitely. You know, I think to that end, multi-cloud is probably more of a thing in Europe than it was necessarily in North America for a longer time because those privacy laws you talked about before, people have always been looking at the fact they maybe had to use a local cloud for some things. You know, a German cloud run by German people in a German data center and they could use another cloud like Amazon for other things. And, you know, we have UK, we have UK cloud who provide a specific government-based cloud, et cetera. Whereas in America, there was, you know, you could use an American cloud and that was fine. You know, so I think actually in Europe, we've already been at the forefront of that multi-cloud thinking for a while. So, you know, it's worth watching. It is worth watching. I wish we had more time, but you're just going to have to come back. Definitely, any time. All right, we look forward to seeing you at VMware. And we thank you for sharing some insights with John and me on theCUBE today. Cool, thank you. For John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019. Thanks for watching.